Scene Book

He nuzzled his head between her breasts, his hair cold and dead. "Baby, I had a hard day. You just believe it, I had a hard day. I'm gonna quit it, I'm gonna give this bag up, you just watch and see, baby."
A long time ago, she had been a very fast girl, quick to catch on, popular in the girls' club at school, sought after, kissed and petted and loved. Right now it seemed almost silly that she should be hooked, with scars on her arms, with nothing but a housedress on because she felt too lazy and sluggish to dress in the mornings, with an ugly little black man who held the bag containing all the riches and loves and romances she had ever dreamed of, held them in condensed version, powdered form...

Tough 1960 urban crime and addiction novel, set almost entirely within an African American setting. Comes on like blaxploitation at first, but get beyond that-- there was no such thing as blaxploitation in 1960, that was a much later complication. A lot of the slang and drug patter here would have read like Martian-language back in 1960 to anyone outside of the inner city drug milieu. The narrative itself reads and feels authentic, a painfully extracted biopsy along the axis of race and drug abuse, in the America that fancied itself the grand accomplishment of the postwar era world.

Author Cooper spoke from experience, and wrote without sparing anyone's sensibilities; he was a user and a convicted narcotics offender himself. The Scene was written while incarcerated and kicking heroin in prison. He died destitute and alone in 1978.